On-Demand Streaming App Development: How to Build a Mobile or Web Application

The online streaming industry is in the prime of its life. No wonder, as such services can be a decent replacement for TV, radio, fitness studios, books & many other offline services.

The demand for streaming services has also significantly increased because of the COVID-19 restrictions.

According to Market.us research, users spend 32% of their time on streaming services. Moreover, 54% of them spend more time on these services than they used to before the lockdown. This shows us that the demand for online streaming services increases day by day.

Besides, most services offer a free trial so their potential users get an opportunity to check whether they like the platform and are willing to pay for it or not.

You should also consider making various subscription options. For instance, “Basic”, “Standard”, and “VIP” — all of them will then have a different level of access.

Sometimes, companies also offer their users a free subscription with a limited number of features.

Additionally, there’s often a family subscription. It costs a bit more than other ones but allows users to add family members into the account and simultaneously use the service from multiple devices. It’s a good way for users to engage their friends and family members to use your services, too.

Don’t forget to inform your clients about how they can cancel the subscription or change the plan, as the absence of such instructions can be repellent. This way, you can create trustworthy relationships with your customers, as well as do everything in your power to see a profit increase for yourself.

Such a business model is used by many streaming giants like Netflix and Spotify.

# 2: Advertising

This one is quite simple — you charge other companies to place their advertisements on your platform. It’s also possible to add product placements in the video content itself (if it’s suitable for its topic).

Let’s take a look at YouTube. Their services are entirely free but you have to watch ads in the videos from time to time. However, if you subscribe to YouTube Premium — the ads will be gone.

If you have audio materials on your streaming site, look at what Spotify did. They put a short advertising record (no more than 5 seconds) while the song was playing. This went only for their free version. If users get the paid subscription, such things won’t be relevant anymore.

# 3: Pay-per-action

Normally, the name is pay-per-view but we decided to modify it so it would fit a wider range of business types.

It can fit you if you want to broadcast some events like concerts or sports — something to offer one-time access to.

It’s also popular to sell access to books, movies, and songs.

However, this business model is slowly fading aways — if you choose it, there will be someone offering similar services for a monthly subscription, which tends to be seen as more beneficial among customers.

Users’ Internet Connection 📶

Internet connection plays a significant role in online streaming services — it impacts the quality, the speed of loading, and so on.

If the speed isn’t fast enough, the loading can take ages which isn’t good for the user experience.

Thus, to prevent such an inconvenience, you should offer various quality options (from 360p to 4K is quite a wide range). And don’t load the connection with unnecessary requests.

The minimum internet speed needed for broadcasting definition movies is 2 megabits per second (Mb/s).

But for high qualities like 1080p and 4K, the speed has to be much higher of course.

In addition, it’s great to offer your clients an opportunity to download the content — the connection might not be stable all the time.

Thus, they’ll be able to download everything they want when it’s stable and access the materials when it’s not.

All of that is most important if you want to make a video streaming website because of the video quality.

Age Restrictions 🔞

If your website has content that can’t or shouldn't be freely broadcasted to all ages, you should notify your viewers about it.

Normally, such content will be marked as 14,16, or 18+, depending on its type. Alternatively, you can add a disclaimer.

Besides, you can ask for users’ age during the sign-up process and then show the relative content.

Another great way to deal with this aspect is by adding a so-called kids lock or kids account option.

Parents or adults can mark this account as “for kids” and the content will be automatically filtered according to the restrictions.

Security & Video Encryption 🔐

For the sake of your content and users’ personal data security, you should undertake some action to provide this level of security.

Here’s the list:

• Regular technical audits to detect any failures or breaches in the security system.
• Locking the content to a certain domain so that the code can’t be copied and inserted into another system.
• Licensing and compliance with regulations. But that depends on the type of content you provide, though.

For example, to offer movies and series, you need to either buy them from an authorized distributor or get copyrights yourself.

Besides, you should encrypt your content while broadcasting as well as downloading.

To understand how encryption works, we recommend you to watch this video from Mashable. The information is visualized really well here:

That particular example is with text messages, but practically, the scheme with video encrypting works similarly.

It’s not only important to protect your copyrights and your content from being watched out of your service.

It’s not only important to protect your copyrights and your content from being watched outside of your service, but also to protect it from frauds since they can publish your content illegally which will lead to law violations.

Cloud Hosting 💭

To store content and show it to your viewers, it needs to be placed somewhere else first, right? Nowadays, one of the most agile places to do it is a cloud hosting server.

Cloud hosting is a network of both physical and virtual servers that aren’t dependent on but connected to each other.

The main difference from regular hosting servers is that the website isn’t placed on a single server but the content is spread all over the network.

To better structure the information, we recommend you to watch this video on cloud hosting from GoDaddy:

Here you can show your care for customers and ask about their interests to provide high-quality content that’s best suitable for them.

For example, Netflix asks to choose 3 TV series that a user likes best. Based on that information, the system will offer similar content.

But again, this is just an example - it’s not that hard to develop and works well with various solutions and different scopes.

# 2: Home Screen 📊

This is the first screen that shows up after you either go on a website or sign in.

Often, websites put the Home Screen before the sign-in stage so that potential users could learn about their services. From here, they place the sign-in button so customers can access more advanced features and start using services.

Anyway, the content & information on the Home Screen will strongly depend on the type of content you provide.

Generally, there will be a:

• Search bar.
• Content list.
• “Sign in” button (if you don’t ask for registration in the beginning).
• Pricing & subscription options.
• Contact information & others.

Besides, here you can recommend the content to your users depending on what they like.

If you monetize your business by advertising, the Home Screen is where you can place it. However, don’t be too intrusive with it — users are much pickier and more demanding right now.

# 3: Filtering & Sorting 🔍

Depending on the type of content and its diversity, filters will most likely be different.

A generalized list with filters can look like this. Filters by:

• Categories (they will change depending on the type of your content).
• Price (if you use pay-per-... model).
• Length/duration of the content.
• Age & others.

Sure thing, you should add a search bar in case a user has a specific request.

# 4: Audio & Video Player ▶️

Dare we say that almost every streaming service has some type of video and/or audio content.

To provide better user experience, you can add some extended features like:

• Rewind & fast forward 10 seconds.
• Continue watching from the moment a user stopped last time.
• Change playback speed (0.25x — 2x).
• Subtitles.

However, there can be additional features for players you might need for your specific type of content.

# 5: Content Downloading 📥

To give users additional value, streaming platforms often offer the downloading feature so that video/audio files can be accessed even without an Internet connection.

Normally, this feature would be a part of a subscription package and not a free version (if you offer a certain part of your services for free).

Be sure to take care of security so that your content won’t be used illegally.

# 6: Metrics 📈

A streaming service has to be extremely user-oriented. To understand what users like and track the workflow of your solution as well as its quality, you need to gather certain metrics and analyze them.

It’s important for video streaming business to measure these stats.

These metrics can include:

• Daily active users.
• New users/subscriptions/purchases depending on what your monetization model is (over a certain period of time).
• The audience characteristics (demography, age, sex, and so on).
• Most/least popular content.
• The average duration of the visit.
• Bounce rate.
• Revenue & others.

Besides, it’ll be great if this data will be presented in the form of infographics instead of simple charts. This way, it’s easier to track the dynamics.

You can additionally provide users with some fun stats like the most watched content, how long they’ve been using your services, and so on. It can keep users engaged and excited. Some of them might want to share these stats on Social Media that will give you additional marketing.

# 7: Live Streaming 📣

If you want to make a video streaming service, think about adding a live streaming video feature.